How’s this for embarrassing?
On October 22, Britain’s secretary of state for climate change, Ed Miliband, helped to launch a new exhibition called “Prove It!” at the venerable Science Museum in London. The exhibition promised to offer visitors “all the evidence you need to believe in climate change” and invited them to count themselves “In” or “Out” of the following statement: “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.” But most visitors aren’t convinced by the evidence: To date, 5,206 people have counted themselves in to that statement, and 7,607 have counted themselves out.
These embarrassing figures are an improvement on the earliest voting tallies. On October 24, two days after the exhibition opened, only 415 had counted themselves in and 2,385 had counted themselves out. As of the first of November, 1,006 people were in, and 6,110 were out. Following much handwringing by green commentators (one said the poll results showed that “climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease”), green bloggers told their readers to go and vote In. This has upped the In vote to 5,206, which means it’s still lagging behind the Outs by 2,401 votes.
The results are hardly scientific or electorally airtight. You can vote at the exhibition itself or on the accompanying “Prove It!” website. The Science Museum says there has been “repeat voting,” which is inevitable with this kind of thing. And yet the poll has caused much gnashing of teeth and soul-searching amongst greens, who cite it as evidence of the creeping victory of evil “denialism” over The Science.
In fact, after visiting the “Prove It!” exhibition, I can fully understand why people voted Out — it’s not because they’re irrational idiots, but probably because they don’t like being treated like wide-eyed five-year-olds.
“Prove It!” is spectacularly patronizing. As soon as you enter the Science Museum, a vast building that was opened in 1909 and receives nearly three million visitors a year, you see DayGlo orange arrows on the floors and walls saying “Prove It!” Clearly designed to distract visitors’ attention from the more serious stuff at the Science Museum — the decidedly grey or black machines, engines, airplanes, and so on — the arrows entice visitors to the “Prove It!” exhibition at the back of the museum in the same way Ronald McDonald might tempt children with fries and a shake.
“Prove It!” is not an exhibition at all. There are no exhibits, nothing in glass jars, no machines to look and wonder at. Nor is there any real scientific information: no graphs, pie charts, or papers to read and reflect on. Instead there is a seating area with a huge Sun-like object in the middle, a bright disc suspended from the ceiling by orange wires. And this Sun-like object flashes up various slogans, such as “The glaciers are melting,” and also “Climate Change” where the word “change” morphs into “Change the way we live.”
That we are expected to sit and stare at this “Sun,” to be passive recipients of some higher wisdom from a disc hovering above our heads, speaks volumes about how environmentalists view both “science” and ordinary people’s intellectual capabilities. For them, scientific fact is a kind of divine revelation, an unquestionable truth, which must be delivered from on high to us little people in order to wake us from our consumerist-induced stupor and make us rethink our destructive habits. In treating science as both Gospel and political weapon, the green-leaning organizers of this exhibition have committed an act of double violence against scientific truth and integrity.
Indeed, the “Prove It!” exhibition unwittingly, yet brilliantly, illustrates why climate-change alarmism has no place in the world of real science, an arena that ought to be marked by open-mindedness, truth-seeking, and intellectual seriousness. Where most of the Science Museum engages visitors through intelligent exhibitions, explaining in measured terms how things were discovered or how breakthroughs were made, the “Prove It!” exhibition screams slogans in our faces from an overhead projector. Where many of the rooms in the Science Museum take us through the various leaps forward that led to modern technology and medicine, the “Prove It!” exhibition contains no climate science at all (presumably it’s too complicated for us idiots), only ready-made, life-altering slogans.
When science is treated as given, unquestionable, and supremely authoritative, Sun-like in its obviousness, then it ceases to be science at all and becomes something closer to religious decree. The motto of the U.K. Royal Society, which helped to found the Science Museum 100 years ago, was “On the word of no one,” capturing science’s rejection of traditional forms of wisdom and authority and its embrace of experimentation, exploration, and the authority of the truth alone. Yet today, we are expected to uncritically accept the word of the Science Museum, and to vote in favor of using so-called scientific fact to drive an explicitly political agenda at Copenhagen in December.
In rejecting this sham, people have not behaved irrationally. In fact, they have exercised the very skepticism and suspicion of received authority that underpins all great scientific thinking.
– Brendan O’Neill is the editor of spiked and the author of Can I Recycle My Granny? And 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas.